One of the biggest problems is that things that are “notable” and “significant” are also widely known, which means I’m rarely going to be looking up info on it in the first place.

At least let us be able to view the deleted material since it doesn’t actually go away, you just have to be a sysop to get access to it if you insist on being a pedantic putz about it.

How would you handle the disambiguation page for “David Adams” in a world where me and the dozen “ordinary” David Adamses I’ve personally known in my life–not to mention the tens of thousands of others, not just alive but dead–could have their own Wikipedia entry? What about John Smith? And who’s going to vet all those entries for verifiability?

I can’t think of a fair way, other than something like a notability filter, to make that work. Maybe I’m focusing on too small an issue with my example, but I do think the point of Wikipedia is to collect notable information, not all information. There’s Google for that.

If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be notable.

Is that different from “verifiable”? I don’t know. It certainly sounds more stringent, but I think all it really says is that a topic needs to be verified by a reliable source (which appears to be the basis of inclusion of almost all information on Wikipedia–apart from maybe contentious information that people want more than one source for.)

At any rate, even restricting articles to just verifiable information is a world better than anything goes (which is what a completely fame-free entry would imply.)

Maybe Wikipedia should restrict itself to verifiable information, which is probably a larger set than “notable” information. It could strongly encourage every article to have citations, which I think is already the case.

I’ve never heard of Leslie Harpold, so I’m not particularly bothered by the AfD, but no one ever said Wikipedia’s process was perfect.